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the Red Queen was that of a ten-year-old girl. Specifically that of Angela Ashford, the young daughter of one of the muckitymucks in Research & Development. Lisa couldn’t imagine that Barr came up with that himself, as it required a level of sentimentality the old man simply did not possess. No doubt it was required by Ashford or one of his supporters on the Board of Directors.
    Never having met Angie Ashford, Lisa had no idea if the personality Barr had programmed in matched that of the young child. She suspected it didn’t, that Barr had made the girl as unpleasant as possible in revenge for the political sop to Ashford that modeling the computer after his daughter likely was.
    If, on the other hand, the personality did match that of the real Angie Ashford, Lisa had the utmost sympathy for Dr. Ashford’s pain and suffering.
    Lisa’s job description was to make sure that the Red Queen’s systems remained secure. In reality, this meant spending all her days dealing with a ten-year-old girl who had inherited her creator’s attitude problem.
    â€œIt isn’t working,” the Red Queen said in her prissy little schoolgirl voice. The voice came crisply from the Perrymyk speakers sitting on either side of Lisa’s flatscreen monitor. The upper-right-hand corner of saidmonitor was taken up with the image of a prissy little schoolgirl face, whose lip movements matched the sounds.
    Sighing, Lisa wondered why anyone would find this preferable to a simple error message. As it was, that face was a daily reminder of why she was eternally grateful that she and Nick had decided not to have kids.
    â€œAll right,” she said, typing in a sequence of commands, “let’s compile it again, see where the error crops up.”
    â€œWe don’t need to do that. The error is in the patch you wrote. Don’t worry about it, I can rewrite it for you.”
    â€œNo you can’t, either,” Lisa said. “Show me where the error is. I’ll fix it.”
    Eight weeks, and the damn machine still was treating her as if she were an idiot. Like programmer, like program.
    â€œVery well, if you insist, but it’s wholly unnecessary. I can do this myself. The whole point of having an artificial intelligence is to give me the opportunity to be intelligent.”
    Barr had said the same thing ten years ago at MIT, word for word. No surprise he programmed it into his greatest achievement.
    Luckily, Umbrella’s higher-ups were a bit more far-sighted—or, at the very least, had seen 2001. No matter what happened, there was always to be some human oversight to anything the Red Queen did.
    In the last two months, Lisa had learned that Barrhad not been thrilled with this, and had tried to have Lisa’s position eliminated after her predecessor transferred to another department.
    Instead, they took the job out of Barr’s purview. Although she worked with the computer system, she was not part of the Computer Services staff—she reported to Security Division.
    Though most of their work involved the physical security of Umbrella’s various corporate headquarters and their employees, Umbrella’s bosses decided to include electronic security. That meant that she reported directly to the head of Security Division, a taciturn man who went solely by the unlikely codename of “One.”
    They still put her in with the other techies, though, giving her a sleek metal desk indistinguishable from all the other sleek metal desks. On the far wall was a large window, covered in blinds, that gave a spectacular view of the Raccoon City skyline.
    All the more spectacular by virtue of its being fake. They even piped muffled street noises in. It was Umbrella’s way of making them feel like they weren’t a thousand feet underground. After all, despite the size of the Hive, it could still get damn claustrophobic, knowing you were spending all your time in a big hole in the ground,